1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to improved parsing and manipulation of data such as a markup language.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the increased popularity of web-hosted services and applications, portals and other Service Providers (SPs) have begun to offer hosted applications that enhance, or even replace, traditional desktop applications. For example, it is increasingly more common to compute one's taxes, pay bills, and manage daily appointments and e-mails via the World Wide Web, instead of through traditional locally-installed software applications.
Along with this growth, there is an accompanying need for derivative services that leverage and integrate existing web-hosted services, allowing end users to access data obtained from multiple services and presented in a single page or set of pages.
Building derivative services for applications hosted across various domains poses new challenges compared with building services such as search engines and shopping comparison sites. Search engines and shopping comparison sites handle web pages that need not be specific to individual users and can remain static for a sizeable period of time, since content may often remain unchanged for hours, days or even weeks at a time. In contrast, derivative services for hosted applications must deal with highly dynamic and personalized web pages. For example, it would not be at all desirable for old e-mail to be redelivered, or for new e-mail to be substantially delayed because of a service that was slow to update. These derivative services should therefore interact with hosted applications on behalf of the end user in real time.
To provide derivative services, there is a difficulty of having to scale the number of virtual browsers, which establish connections from a derivative services provider (DSP) to primary web servers to retrieve content on a user's behalf, to the number of concurrent users of the DSP. Traditional browsers are designed for desktop use, and typically require several megabytes of memory to run. Virtual browsers are not being run on the users' machines, but instead are being executed by the DSP. As a result, content retrieved by a virtual browser may not even be displayed on any screen, but instead just passed to another system for further processing. If a separate virtual browser were instantiated on a DSP server for each end user, the resulting tax on the server's processor and memory could quickly become overwhelming. However, in order to provide the kind of derivative services discussed above in which existing web-hosted services from primary servers are integrated and delivered simultaneously, there is a need for multiple virtual browsers to operate simultaneously on the DSP side. This problem, i.e. the need for multiple virtual browsers and the difficulty in providing them, has been an obstacle to the growth of the derivative services area. Accordingly, what is needed is a system and method for providing scalable derivative services that avoids the processing and memory drain present in current implementations.